Sean Kerr built and currently maintains a simple web application engine (’tain’t a framework!) called Redline. He and a few other guys I know (Wess & Brandon) have raved about the deadly speed+simplicity of it for quite awhile now, so I thought I’d give it a go with a site I’m building for my day job.

To begin, I set up a basic vhost container in Apache in which to drop the RL code:

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<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName redline.local
    DocumentRoot /sites/redline.local/www
 
    <Directory /sites/redline.local/www>
        Options -Indexes, FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Then I create the site directory, download the Redline package from Sean’s site, and unzip it:

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 drew@server$  mkdir -p /sites/redline.local
 drew@server$  cd /sites/redline.local
 drew@server$  wget http://code-box.org/work/redline-0.1.zip
 drew@server$  unzip redline-0.1.zip
 drew@server$  cp -R redline-0.1/* .
 drew@server$  rm -rf redline-0.1/

At this point, the contents of my /sites/redline.local/ directory is:

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 cache/
 config.xml
 docs/
 lib/
 modules/
 tags/
 www/

Redline expects all requests to be rewritten through the document root’s www/index.php script in order to properly dispatch each request. To get that running right, I create the following .htaccess file under www/:

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RewriteEngine On
 
# don't rewrite the index script, or any CSS, javascript, or image files
RewriteRule ^(index\.php|js|css|images) - [NC,L]
 
# everything else goes through the index bootstrap
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]

Another problem I ran into is that the dispatcher parses $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] in order to determine what’s being requested, but for some reason on my VirtualBox server (Ubuntu 8.10, Apache2) I don’t have that variable available. I googled a bit to find out how to get it set, but the most sensible solution (AcceptPathInfo On) didn’t pan out either. Instead, I cracked open Redline’s config.xml and told it to use REQUEST_URI instead of PATH_INFO:

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...
    <!-- request path details -->
    <define name="RL_PATH_INFO">REQUEST_URI</define>
..

Redline is built to parse that XML config and generate a PHP script that gets stored under the cache/ directory, which means that directory will need to be writable for the user that Apache runs as (www-data, nobody, apache, etc). There are a few ways to handle this, but the quick and dirty option is to just chmod 777 cache, which effectively gives every user on the server read/write access to everything in that directory. Since I own the whole machine it’s not a security concern, but in a shared environment you’d want to take a slightly less shotgun approach (assuming it’s an issue at all).

Next I edit my hosts file so that redline.local resolves to my server’s IP address, and I give it a test run by pointing my browser to http://redline.local/redline, which loads up the example redline module provided in the package. And what do I see?

Welcome to Redline

Yay! Next I’ll set up another module and explain what I’ve learned so far about routing.